Real-time marketing is

marketing Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of Business administration, business management and commerce. Marketing is usually conducted by the seller, typically a retailer or ma ...

performed " on-the-fly" to determine an appropriate or optimal approach to a particular

customer In sales, commerce, and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a Client (business), client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a Good (economics), good, service (economics), service, product (business), product, or an Intellectual prop ...

at a particular time and place. It is a form of

market research Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers. It involves understanding who they are and what they need. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining com ...

inbound marketing that seeks the most appropriate offer for a given customer sales opportunity, reversing the traditional outbound marketing (or

interruption marketing Interruption marketing or outbound marketing is promoting a product through continued advertising, promotions, public relations and sales. It's the opposite of permission marketing. It is considered to be an annoying version of the traditional way o ...

) which aims to acquire appropriate customers for a given 'pre-defined' offer. The dynamic 'just-in-time' decision making behind a real-time offer aims to exploit a given customer interaction defined by website clicks or verbal contact centre conversation.

History

Real-time marketing techniques developed during the mid-1990s following the initial deployment of

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategic process that organizations use to manage, analyze, and improve their interactions with customers. By leveraging data-driven insights, CRM helps businesses optimize communication, enhance cus ...

(CRM) solutions in major

retail banking Retail banking, also known as consumer banking or personal banking, is the provision of services by a bank to the general public, rather than to companies, corporations or other banks, which are often described as wholesale banking (corporate ...

investment banking Investment banking is an advisory-based financial service for institutional investors, corporations, governments, and similar clients. Traditionally associated with corporate finance, such a bank might assist in raising financial capital by und ...

and

telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

companies. The intrinsic and prevailing 'heavyweight' nature of the key CRM vendors at this time, who were generally focused on major back and front office system integration projects, provided an opportunity for niche players within the campaign management application arena.

Solution delivery

The implementation of real-time marketing solutions through the late 1990s would typically involve a 10- to 14-week delivery project with 1-2 FTE expert consultants and often would follow an earlier outbound marketing solution implementation. This relatively lightweight delivery model had obvious appeal within the vendor sales cycle and customer procurement context but was ultimately to prove a disincentive for major

systems integration System integration is defined in engineering as the process of bringing together the component sub-systems into one system (an aggregation of subsystems cooperating so that the system is able to deliver the overarching functionality) and ensuring ...

services providers to partner with real-time marketing vendors.

Technical overview

Real-time marketing solution implementation classically involves the server-side installation of a multithreaded core decisioning application server / interaction transactional-biased

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and supporting client components such as a fat-client desktop campaign studio / rules editor, browser-based marketing user reporting interface and enterprise application

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

s such as

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components. Vendors typically will also provide legacy interfaces for COM, sockets and

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

integration. Vendor solution approaches to real-time learning naturally vary but commonly, the underlying models utilize a naive

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classifier, recognizing that despite their apparently oversimplified assumptions, these classifiers have worked well in many complex real-world situations. To help gain acceptance with in-house specialist

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

stakeholders, the real-time solutions also support external model scores and execution within offer decision making. The

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'bust' of 2000 inhibited the further development and implementation of item-based

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techniques. Having been incorporated within real-time marketing solutions through the 1990s, these filtering techniques should have been immediately attractive to online retailers managing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of products as opposed to a retail bank with a hundred propositions across savings, credit card and

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product lines.

Marketing vision

Over time, it became apparent to solution vendors and maturing customers alike that 'traditional' outbound and emergent inbound marketing initiatives should be consolidated within a coherent and coordinated enterprise marketing strategy. To this end, a class of marketing application known as marketing resource management (MRM) which 'sits above' real-time marketing, began to emerge during the early 21st Century, albeit in a fairly bespoke and implementation-specific guise. The essence of this abstraction layer is that the MRM application orchestrates strategy, stakeholder sign-off, budgeting, program planning, campaign execution and effectiveness reporting across inbound real-time and outbound marketing disciplines.

Unrealized promise

The term "real-time marketing" has the potential weakness of self-limiting the underlying decisioning server capability to cross-sell and up-sell despite the observation that this particular function is generally the most compelling aspect of the application class. Vendors therefore found themselves re-branding real-time marketing products to suggest a more holistic appreciation of enterprise interaction decision management. In some respects, these early real-time marketing customer implementations were ahead of their time despite acknowledged revenue realization within the

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s. Hosted real-time marketing solutions are an obvious and increasingly prevalent means of provisioning organizational demand for this critical enterprise capability. A remaining challenge for such solution vendors is to fully convince enterprise clients that the customer data profile (often comprising up to 1000 source or derived attributes) involved in the decision making and targeting processes is fully secure. Packaged 'private' cloud solutions are already appearing alongside 'cloud sourcing' management consultancies. Gartner's predictions for the Gartner Top 10 Technologies for 2011 suggest that whatever the nomenclature, real-time marketing will continue to evolve, crucially to embrace mobile platforms underpinned by an awareness of customer context, location and social networking (

collective intelligence Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that Emergence, emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiolog ...

) implications.

References